It’s well documented that when the Soviet Union collapsed like a pack of cards, after Gorbachev’s 60-hour confinement, India’s Moscow envoy cabled that the former President had “brought about the disintegration of the (Communist) party”. P V Narasimha Rao, then prime minister, had later quipped: “Mr Gorbachev’s ouster was a warning to people who favoured reforms without control”.
Among the many truths about that moment was that, geopolitically speaking, India was bushwacked: despite Rao’s own much-feted sagacity, India had not been able to anticipate the moment of a dear all-weather friend’s demise. So while the world, particularly western democracies, celebrated Yeltsin as a liberation hero, New Delhi was circumspect. It had been one of the stable, old factors in the Congress-ordained political ecosystem—a universe of consensus that largely survived intact, since the Congress shared much of it with the socialist Janata parivar—and now New Delhi was not sure how to adjust to the idea that it could no longer lean back on the comforting presence of a friendly USSR. Transformation can sometimes be incremental, all planned and well-governed, and sometimes it sneaks up on you like a sudden crack in history.
Two-and-a-half decades later, the Congress still remains as unprepared as it was then to readjust to the New Order, at home and out there. It’s still hanging on to the truisms of ‘secular socialism’ and ‘social democracy’, without a stern examination of why they failed the party (and large parts of India), while the landscape around it has mutated and moved on. Offering the counter that Rao was himself a kind of long-playing Gorbachev—sowing the seeds of his own party’s eventual decline—is all fine. Love and nostalgia can’t stand in for a new vocabulary of thought and introspection.
When P Chidambaram resurfaced at the AICC headquarters to talk about preferring ‘liberty’ over ‘life’, he sounded as out-of-tune as India had been at the moment of Soviet demise. When he was incommunicado for nearly 27 hours before that, the analogy wasn’t quite Kashmir—he was apparently at a lawyer friend-cum-party colleague’s house, the TV-tailored drama seemingly perfectly choreographed from both ends! The only people cheering him, therefore, seemed to be the aficionados of the ancien regime.
A strong whiff of elitism had always attended to them. That’s why they’re unable to adjust to the fact that ‘liberty’ in the new order betokens something else: the ability to abuse your opponents, ideological or otherwise, and not ‘liberty’ as enshrined in the bound book: rights derived from lofty ideas of freedom. It’s the breaking down of old protocols of respect, which had a feudal veneer anyway. Nothing matters anymore, age, social stature, intellectual calibre, or any other form of eminence. It’s a sort of democratisation of the polity. The old elite that once decided the terms of engagement has lost its leverage. It’s a new world: the language, the topography and the rules of the game have all changed. But the Congress is still in a mental world that has not demonetised those roubles locked up in the family safe.
At the mundane level of everyday politics, some felt Chidambaram and his party missed an opportunity to stir up some low drama of its own: marching to the CBI headquarters shouting slogans, surrendering in a martyr’s high, accusing the present regime of selectively picking on prominent opposition leaders, while conveniently rubbing the slate clean for those who’ve been coopted or bought over. Chidambaram was admittedly too busy drafting his own legal exit routes for the courts and investigating agencies to spare too much for carpe diem bravado. What with the kind of details on the money trails vomited out by Indrani Mukherjea—the accused-turned-approver who, let us not forget for a moment, is accused of murdering her own daughter in a bizarre tale aswirl with talk of incest and what not.
Anyway, the document in circulation on the INX Media bribery case is as startling as it’s revealing of the functioning, again, of the old order. It’s another matter that the intermediary between the Chidambarams and the controversial, go-getter Mukherjea couple has extricated himself from the mess, having wrung a settlement of a few crores out of latter, and bounced back in the system, cribbing about the lack of lounging facilities in Indian airports.
Those felled are, of course, often showpiece victims. Some of the old go-betweens may have been pushed to the fringes of Lutyens Delhi, but many survive unbruised: friends, hangers-on and arm candies of the old order who have now procured the gate pass to the new Lutyens Delhi. Just that the password is no longer caviar, fresh asparagus, truffle oil on the table, or a good vintage jazz LP collection: just loud, frequent shouts of BMKJ!
The Chidambarams, needless to say, have a lot to worry about. It’s not just about Indrani singing like a canary in jail. There’s quite an alphabet soup to swim in: the CBI and ED (who now evoke dread like the Soviet KGB!) have lined up a string of kickbacks and nepotism allegations, including clearances given to Essar Steel, Katara Holdings and Diageo Scotland, to keep them tied to the 10th floor and the interrogation table for a while. Political comparisons with another high-profile arrest won’t go beyond memes or cartoons. It’s a changed milieu where India votes with Israel against Palestine. Swachhta, swasthya, sanitation—tangible brick-and-mortar stuff—are the buzzwords, not an amorphous package of rights legislations. The economy may be slithering down to hitherto-unknown depths, Dalits
may be out on the streets of Delhi, but hey…celebrate, for the first time, a former Union home minister has been arrested!
Santwana Bhattacharya
Resident Editor, Karnataka
Email: santwana@newindianexpress.com